Making

Where i've felt lacking for the last ~5 years though is output. Specifically blocked by having the energy to create all these damn ideas.

I find LLMs neat, albeit their own type of exhausting, as they open up a lot of possibilities for things i want. Ie software i've wanted but have never cared to find the time for or didn't have the time for.

LLMs feel like a software equivalent to a 3D Printer. I don't have to carve it out of wood now. But also like a 3D printer there are some tasks that LLMs are just horrible for. So it's a niche, a skill even, to find software you want that also are a good for for unsupervised development. It's also of course massively more risky than a 3D printed doohickey depending on its internet access/etc.

With that said i still don't really take pride in something vibe coded. I just take enjoyment out of using a thing that i've wanted but never had time for.

So like when I went to a restaurant last week and "made" a cheeseburger with no lettuce and extra onions, because it wouldn't exist if I hadn't created it.

To me, making something can mean you did the physical work of its creation even if there's no particular creative expression, like "I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

It can also apply to tasks where you've offloaded a bunch of work that once would've been done by hand, like "I made this bench using a circular saw."

Where things get hairy even with physical objects is processes like CNC or 3D printers. If you download "Articulated dragon.stl" from a website and press the print button, did you make that? Personally, no. But if you designed your own flexy dragon and printed it, then yes. If you set up a relief carving on a CNC machine or do a perfectly fit inlay, are you making that? Operating these still takes quite a bit of knowledge and skill, but different knowledge and skill from hand woodworking. What if the tools improve and become very easy to operate?

I don't think there's a hard line you can draw. But if there is, it's somewhere between "did everything by hand with no assistance from recently invented tools because those are cheating" and "ordered a sandwich and waited for the finished result to show up."

Both of the examples the parent gave include some kind of planning and ideating to get to a final product, regardless of the fact that they employed tools to do a bulk of the coding work.

It was never about writing every line by hand, it was about solving a problem and making my life better. LLMs let me do that at a speed never seen before.

I was and am and avid Home Assistant fan but the number of automations/scripts I now have is higher by a magnitude than ever before. Few things would reach the level where it made sense to spend my time writing and debugging a workflow but now I can speak my automations into existence.

Yesterday I got a candle warmer, I wanted to set it up so when I turned it on it started a timer to turn off and I wanted a push notification to see if I wanted to extend the timer when it was close to finishing. All things I knew were possible but HA YAML is miserable (all YAML is) and the UI is not much better (it's a hard problem, I get it). I prompted Claude and had a working implementation in My HA automations have never been more bulletproof and if they do something wrong it's as simple as telling Claude Code and having it fix the problem. For example, my motion activated lights (motion sensor -> HA -> smart switch) were working great but I realize that while in the shower my main bathroom lights would sometimes turn off. 1 prompt later and Claude grouped up my motion sensor in the shower to the one in the bathroom so if motion on either was detected the lights would stay on but the shower light would only turn on if its motion detector detected motion.

HA is only one small part of my LLM usage but it's representative of my overall point.